


Weaving in the Ends

by FreakishLemon



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Knitting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 12:38:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/774281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreakishLemon/pseuds/FreakishLemon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson learned to knit when he was eight years old.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weaving in the Ends

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at my LiveJournal on January 5th, 2011.

John Watson learned to knit when he was eight years old. 

Mum and Dad were having one of their fights again. Harriet, being older, had wisely begged to stay the weekend at a friend’s house. She had already learned to recognize the signs of the impending dispute and knew when to act. John was not yet experienced in such things, so he was sent off to his gran’s house with a hastily packed backpack containing a couple of changes of clothes and a handful of old comic books. 

He was _bored_. 

While his gran went about cleaning and cooking and doing all the things that grandmothers do around the house, he read his comic books three times through and annoyed his gran’s little old dog until it hid under the bed in the guest room and counted how long it took raindrops to slide down the windows of his gran’s sitting room. He sighed loudly, in that way that only eight year old boys can, and his gran smiled at him and shook her head. John flopped himself face down onto the sofa dramatically, but stilled as he watched her fetch a fat tote bag from her bedroom and hook it onto one of the arms of her rocking chair before settling herself down. He watched her hands as she worked, one long needle in each and the yarn looping inexplicably as the needles moved. 

John could never remember how long he had watched, but it occurred to him some time later that he was watching something being _made_. He’d made things at school, of course – paper Christmas ornaments and the like – but his gran was making a real, proper thing. Someone would _wear_ whatever it was when she finished it. 

“How does it work?” he had asked, endlessly fascinated with the soft clicks and the texture of the yarn when he got up and touched the finished parts of the knitting. 

“Like this.” And his gran had turned it so that he could see how her hands moved. He still didn’t understand, but he watched eagerly. She had asked if he wanted to learn and he had said yes without hesitation. 

 

It was three years before John finished making anything. He had barely been able to hold the needles in those first lessons and he couldn’t keep the yarn straight and he fumbled with everything until it fell apart and he had to start over. It frustrated him. 

But John was stubborn - always had been, much to the dismay of both of his parents and his teachers and the boys he played football with after school - and he tackled knitting the same way he dealt with spelling and maths. He did it over and over and over until it stuck, carving skill out of sheer determination. 

It was Christmas and he’d knit a scarf for his mum out of the soft yellow yarn he’d found in his gran’s collection. His mum was surprised because she hadn’t even known that he was learning and Harriet called him a pansy for learning something so _girly_ and John was glad that his dad wasn’t there because he knew what his dad would say about it, but his Gran was smiling proudly the whole day and that was good enough. 

 

John never told his mates about the knitting when he was growing up. Even though he loved it, part of him thought that Harriet – or Harry, as she started calling herself – was right and it was kind of girly. His gran would sometimes buy him new needles or a skein or two of yarn that she thought he’d like and he would keep them in a cardboard box under his bed when he wasn’t working on anything. He made scarves for his mum and his gran and Harry and his dad, once his dad had moved away and began to grudgingly accept that this was something his son just did sometimes. 

He once made himself a winter hat, when he had determined that it was time he learned to knit more than just fancy rectangles. It was warm and soft and everything he’d ever wanted in a hat. He was fourteen and school had been closed for snow and his best friend Jeff had come over looking to borrow some gloves so they could go sledding down the street before the snow was all cleared away. Jeff had seen the hat on his bed and tugged it onto his own head and declared it the warmest winter hat ever and demanded to know where John got it so that he could get one. John didn’t know if he answered, but he was so pleased that someone outside of his family thought his knitting was good, he let Jeff keep it. 

 

He was almost seventeen when he finished his first pair of proper mittens. They were blue and white and for his girlfriend whose birthday was in a few days. He had just finished casting off the last thumb, ready to start weaving in all those pesky ends, when she called to break up with him. She had said it wasn’t really working and that she liked him, but she didn’t know if she loved him, not really, and that he shouldn’t go to her birthday party next Saturday because that would be awkward. 

John had hung up the phone without a word and stuffed the mittens into his knitting box and shoved the box as far under his bed as it would go. 

 

John didn’t pull the box back out until he was packing to go off to university. His gran had died the year before and, as he sifted through the box’s contents remembering those first fumbling lessons with her, it occurred to him that he didn’t even know what happened to her knitting stuff. Probably donated somewhere, he thought. Or maybe her old lady friends divided it up amongst themselves. He thought about it only for a moment, then closed up the box and put it on top of the pile of stuff he was bringing with him. 

 

Student housing, apparently, was not built to withstand the winter. John knew that it wouldn’t be like home, but he thought he could at least expect the building to keep out the cold when the temperatures dropped. Of course, that was too much to hope for. 

It was late November and the heating had failed three times in the past two weeks and it was only going to get colder as time went on. Everyone in the building was huddled over their books in as many layers as they could manage, clutching rapidly cooling cups of tea and coffee as they tried to cram the information required for their classes into their brains before they just gave up and started drinking. It was only three in the afternoon and John couldn’t feel his fingers or toes anymore, so he tugged on another pair of socks with a curse and marched out into the city. He would forever cherish the look of confused surprise on his roommate’s face when he returned with a plastic bag full of yarn. 

“What’s that for, then?” he’d asked from his pile of blankets in the corner. He had stationed himself next to radiator in the vain hope that it would kick back on. 

“If they’re not going to fix the damned heating, I’m going to bloody well make myself a decent pair of socks and a decent pair of gloves so I don’t get frostbite.” 

By mid-December, John was the most popular man in the building. He’d forced himself to complete those socks and gloves from some pattern books he’d checked out of the library. Normally, he would have kept remaking them until they were perfect, but the need for warm clothing overruled his usual perfectionism. He got plenty of practice anyway, because his roommate had demanded some socks from his left over yarn and once the word got out that there was a knitter in the building, there were demands for anything he could possibly make to try so that the remainder of the semester a little less hellish. No one had any proper money to give him in exchange, but there was always someone willing to buy pizza if he wanted it and he got free drinks at the college pub when his housemates were on bar. 

There were comments from people about how gay it was that John Watson was a knitter, but he didn’t really care. He played on the rugby team - who, it must be said, all came to him for scarves when it got _really_ cold - and got free drinks and Melissa Davidson – who was widely regarded as the prettiest girl in all of Britain – had agreed to go out with him the week before. It all worked out. 

 

There were times, in Afghanistan, when John wished he had some knitting needles with him. He missed a lot of things from back home, of course, but he was beginning to suspect that he missed having something to do with his hands the most. He was never good at just sitting around and especially not when all hell could break loose at any moment. There was an awful lot of waiting in war, which he hadn’t expected.

But, after thinking about them long enough, he grudgingly supposed that it was for the best that he didn’t have knitting needles with him. He had once managed to stab himself in the thigh with a double pointed needle when he was drunk at university. He didn’t know if they were even allowed or not, but having sharp, metal sticks on him in a war zone might be tempting fate. 

 

He’d been sent back to England with infection in his shoulder, delirious from fever. Harry had come to see him in the hospital, which he didn’t expect, and she told him that she was scared that he might die, but only because he was on a fun cocktail of drugs and probably wouldn’t remember the conversation later because they had never been close and she didn’t want him to start thinking that she _cared_ or anything. He had laughed weakly and told her that he couldn’t die yet. He never learned how to knit a jumper and there was no way in hell he would die before finishing one. Gran would never forgive him. She had told him he was an idiot and then was herded out because visiting hours were over. 

The bullet wound had healed up alright once the infection cleared up, but John was left with this bloody annoying limp that wouldn’t go away and a devastating trembling in his left hand. Harry had asked his physical therapist about knitting in a rare moment of clarity and he had said that it might help with the shaking, but John couldn’t hold the needles long enough to get anything done and it felt like relearning it all over again. 

When he was discharged, Harry bought him a jumper from a little shop that sold handmade clothing in London. He could smell the alcohol on her from the night before and his hand ached when she put the thing in his hands and it felt like his whole world was crashing down as she flagged down a cab for him and kept talking about how she and Clara were getting a divorce, but he didn’t understand why everything felt so flat and cold just then. 

“Hey,” she said, shoving his uninjured shoulder. “This?” She pointed at the jumper in his hands. “This isn’t a punishment, John. You can’t make one now, but you will because you’re a stubborn bastard and _nothing_ ever stops you. Even when it probably should. This is what you work for.”

He looked down at it, an off white cabled thing, and he could see patterns he recognized in the yarn. He leaned his cane against a wall and tugged the jumper on over his head, slowly and careful of his shoulder, which didn’t yet have the full range of motion, and smoothed it down over his chest. One day. 

“Also,” Harry said, shoving a phone into his free hand when he retrieved his cane, “Keep in touch, right?”

He nodded, knowing he was lying because they didn’t get on most of the time, and she nodded, too, knowing he was lying because they really didn’t get on most of the time, and he got into the cab. 

 

Sherlock Holmes could deduce a lot of things about a person from the littlest detail, but he hadn’t managed to pin down the knitting yet, which John found surprising. Sherlock seemed to delight in finding out all the little things about his life, especially things from his past, but he hadn’t figured that one out. It reassured John that Sherlock didn’t root around in his personal belongings while he was at work because he would have surely found the box of knitting needles and John smiled about it whenever Sherlock failed to mention it. It was his little not-really-a-secret and he wondered if Sherlock’s surprise would be as amusing as his roommate’s back in university. 

As fate would have it, they had been living together for nearly a year before an opportunity presented itself. Sherlock had managed to fall into the Thames in pursuit of a particularly cunning burglar and, as a result, his beloved blue scarf – the one he never left the flat without – was lost to the current. Sherlock had supposed, sadly, that he could figure out where it would wash up, but there was little point. It was doubtful it could be salvaged without stinking of the river for the rest of its useful life. 

In an attempt to distract Sherlock from the mourning of his lost garment, Mycroft had packed him up to France to solve some kind of international crisis there and Sherlock had reluctantly agreed because it pricked at his insatiable curiosity and it was milder in France at this time of year and it wasn’t like he would be able to run around London without the thing. John suspected it was more of an image problem than a practical one, but of all of Sherlock’s faults, his vanity was the least troublesome. 

John was pretty sure Sherlock didn’t even notice that he wasn’t coming with him – he had his job, of course, and couldn’t take off – and he grinned to himself when he walked into the little shop the morning after the Holmes brothers had left. It took little effort to find what he was looking for. Soft. Dark blue – nearly the same as the original and close enough to merit appreciation for his efforts. 

He hadn’t picked up the needles since that incident in the hospital. He hand still shook, of course. His adrenaline-fueled, crime solving adventures with his flatmate didn’t make it disappear, but he had noticed it lessening as he adjusted to his life at 221B Baker Street. He didn’t know if it had lessened enough to knit properly again, but he remembered what Harry had said to him. Nothing ever stops John Watson. 

 

Sherlock had been gone a week and John finished the last cast off stitch as he came bounding up the stairs shouting about texts from Lestrade and finding severed arms in someone’s basement and what was he doing?

John didn’t answer until he’d finished weaving in the ends on the new scarf. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was finished and he smiled, even as his left hand cramped with the effort of finishing it in time. 

“John?”

The confusion on Sherlock’s face was much better than his old roommate’s.

“Thought you might need it when you got back,” he said triumphantly, tossing the scarf to Sherlock, who caught it without looking. Sherlock stared at him for a moment more and John knew he was trying to puzzle out what other things lay hidden in him, but then he looked sharply down at the scarf in his hands, blinking as he analyzed it. 

“What was that you were saying about severed arms?” John interrupted, as if nothing surprising was happening whatsoever. He was sure he looked a bit mad, grinning with the victory of his actions and Sherlock’s reaction, but he felt the buzz of success and there was crime to be solved and his friend probably wouldn’t catch anything running around in the damp on his first day back to London from warmer climes.

Sherlock looked up sharply, eyes bright. He tugged on his new scarf with the deliberate motions of something not quite familiar yet and smiled before dashing back out of the flat.

John followed, laughing.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been podficced TWICE.
> 
> [ Weaving in the Ends - Read by lunchee](http://sherlockbbc.livejournal.com/4567565.html)
> 
> [Weaving in the Ends - Read by Miss H](http://archiveofourown.org/works/600375=)


End file.
